A New Approach to Software Integration Frameworks for Multi-physics Simulation Codes
Authors:
Eric deSturler, Jay Hoeflinger, L. V. Kale and Milind Bhandarkar
Parallel Programming Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
In R. Boisvert and P. Tang (Eds), The Architecture of Scientific Software, IFIP TC2/WG2.5 Working Conference on the Architecture of Scientific Software, Ottawa, Canada, Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 87-104, October 2000.
Existing software integration frameworks typically require large manual rewrites of existing codes, or specific tailoring of codes written to be used in the framework. The result is usually a special-purpose code which is not usable outside of the framework. In this paper, we propose an alternative to that model - a framework that requires little hand-modification of the programs which use it. Our proposed framework is compiler-based, mesh-aware, numerics-aware, and physics-aware. Descriptions of the codes and the system make it possible to semi-automatically generate interfacing code, while the internal parallelization, communication and numerical solution methods are left intact. We report on some preliminary experiments with an automatic load balancing framework that demonstrate the feasibility of this approach.